TV Week

TV’s Amuse-Bouche

Whether the credits of a television show are a delightful visual preamble—a mini-story in their own right—or simply a minimalist, stark title-card reveal, do they affect a viewer’s interpretation of the show that follows? In tracing the recent history of credits, Joshua Alston talks to award-winning designers about how their art evolved—and where it’s going.

More than the fact that Don Draper is actually Dick Whitman, a child of poverty and an especially robust case study in Freudian psychosexuality, Don Draper is neither the child of a prostitute nor the alluring fantasy peddler he became. Don Draper is Jon Hamm, a strong-jawed Missourian actor who, before landing the iconic lead role in Mad Men, toiled thanklessly in guest performances on The Hughleys and Charmed, to name a few. We invest in Don Draper thanks to suspension of disbelief, the mechanism of negotiated delusion that allows a storyteller to present facts and the audience to accept them. This happens so often and so seamlessly that we take it for granted, but the storyteller can never take it for granted. The storyteller knows that just as easily as an audience can grant suspension of disbelief, it can also withhold it. See also: Kim Kardashian’s wedding; Julia Stiles’s performance in … anything.

The suspension begins with *Mad Men’*s much discussed title sequence, that elegant curtain-raiser with the stuffed-suit silhouette plummeting from a skyscraper, which acts as the initial invitation into this world of social upheaval, self-reflection, and three fingers of scotch on the rocks. It’s the bridge between our world and Draper’s—and it’s why a creative firm called Imaginary Forces spent weeks spitballing, storyboarding, and generally obsessing over a series of images that runs just shy of 40 seconds. (It paid off-in 2008, they won an Emmy for their trouble.)

The titles are not just the place where actors and writers get their contractually obligated recognition; it’s the place where the reality and the fantasy collide, where we acknowledge that there is a person named Jon Hamm, while being prepared to forget about him seconds later. For contemporary television storytellers, if the story is the dream, the title sequence is the sedative.

To see such a thoughtful, seductive, and meticulous title sequence as the one that kicks off Mad Men is a fairly recent trend for television. There are certainly iconic openers from the television of yore: Mary Tyler Moore’s hat toss; the elegiac MASH* credits; the simple but authoritative title card of Dragnet. But the title sequence as an art form has primarily and most often flourished in the world of film, where budgetary and length flexibilities allow the latitude to include a sequence as breathtaking as the titles of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Naturally, after HBO sparked the original programming gold rush, the network’s effort to obliterate the prestige boundaries between television and film inevitably led the network to approach titles in the same way a film would. Not as a half-hearted afterthought—think the Friends cast frolicking around the fountain—but as an opportunity to get the audience to invest deeply as quickly as possible. The result is often something that lingers longer than the television series itself. It’s totally plausible—reasonable, even—for a Six Feet Under fan to have forgotten the particulars of how Nate Fisher (Peter Krause) ended up with a baby while still being able to storyboard the titles from memory.

Danny Yount, a graphic designer and director based in Los Angeles, is a member of this small, close-knit community of visual magicians. He’s the man behind that impeccable short film that opened Six Feet Under, a title sequence that was peerless at the time, and won Yount an Emmy for outstanding main title design in 2002. (UPN’s short-lived Dilbert adaptation took that award a mere three years prior, further proof of how rapidly television has blossomed in the new millennium.) He still recalls the process, how he and several of his colleagues at the Seattle—based firm Digital Kitchen envisioned different directions after being given Thomas Newman’s sprightly opening theme as inspiration. From a bunch of treatments—one of which featured a graphical journey through a tree’s root system, another tracing the bloom-and-rot cycle of roses—Yount’s was chosen. His sequence, which symbolizes the release of death, and follows a mortician through his quotidian tasks, remains a perfect example of what the difference thoughtful titles can make—even if it was a little ahead of its time.

“A lot of people didn’t really understand it,” says Yount today. “They thought of it as something edgy and cool, not as something that would take the viewer into this ethereal, visceral space.”

A decade later, the television title sequence is still not something most people think of as art—but it is, to a greater degree than ever before. An audience now expects to feel something before the show starts—and not to be simply introduced to a cast. Titles are making giant leaps on the cachet front, as well: last November, the Museum of Modern Art showcased the work of legendary graphic designer Saul Bass, whose experiments in kinetic typography in the films of Alfred Hitchcock continue to influence title designers today. But on the rapidly evolving television landscape, the type of title sequence that has the potential to overshadow the show it’s introducing is still somewhat of a rarity. “We’re the final link in the chain, the part that comes after everyone has already done their work,” says Yount. “We come in when everybody else is ready to be done with the thing, so there’s not always a lot of enthusiasm about it.”

Beyond this, television is still at its pivot point of becoming a respected, revered artistic medium. There aren’t opportunities to create a Six Feet Under credit sequence every day, because there’s not a Six Feet Under making it to the airwaves every day. And the most important thing for a title to do is mesh well with what’s to come—which is why Two and a Half Men has its phoned-in sequence, rather than, say, a detailed graphical rendering of what it means to be half a man.

This is the frustration for a title designer in the New Golden Age of Television. There are huge opportunities, but not as many as there should be, because the type of television that most people watch isn’t the place for elegant, rewindable title sequences. Major networks will always opt for brief title-card reveals wherever possible (see Smash), rather than sucking up valuable advertising time indulging a designer’s vision—no matter how talented the designer or singular the vision. Ian Albinson, a designer who founded the blog Art of the Title, doesn’t think the migration to title cards is necessarily a bad thing, citing Lost and, more recently, Awake as examples. “I think it depends on whether it fits with what the show is and what it’s trying to accomplish,” he says.

Yount isn’t as amenable: “I think it’s a missed opportunity,” he says. “You only have a moment to grab them. It’s like putting dessert before dinner.” And if most title sequences are still closer to a stale Oatmeal Cream Pie than something richer or more indulgent, we can still hope for those like Yount’s—a freshly torched crème brûlée.